SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF

Stay at home campers, hola! Week 9! Still here! Hanging in there, some days with the scrape of a pinky hang nail admittedly, but here all the same.

A good way to avoid being a sweaty slobbering mess, is to use two wheels

Getting out for the food shopping remains a highlight; an excuse to stick on some mascara and brush hair and ignore the eyebrow vegetable patch that's growing down to almost touch eye rims. Oh and some exercise. Despite BoJo's kind gesture to extend exercise to 'limitless' my legs still refuse to step outside the door for the daily run I've been promising myself since around week 2 when I was very disciplined and motivated but now the huffing and puffing around the block is just too painful to endure. Especially now I've left it so long, so I might as well just leave it completely (do you like my logic there?). Snivelling and sweating in this unseasonable heat. A bike ride is much more civilised and pain free but hopeless at shifting the ever expanding 'wine and other rich lockdown foods' that abound the midriff. But never mind. Survival is more important as we stare in the seemingly endless haze of blankness.

It struck me how quickly things have become 'normal.' And how distant life 'pre-Corona' seems to be.

Ah, a pub pulled pint. Taken in the olden days

Do you remember in the 90's with the dot com boom all of a sudden the 80's all day bender lunch became obsolete? Suddenly people were going out for lunch and not drinking and going back to their desks sober to carry on working, raking in the millions clicking buttons as they did it. In the 80's you showed your face at the office around 9am ish then made sure you were in the pub to have a swift half 'livener' before meeting your lunch buddies and then once 3pm had lapsed and you were still knee deep at the table, there was no point going back because a) there was only 2 hours left until you'd be back in the pub and b) you were already half shit-faced. Corona will be to us what the dot com boom was to the yuppies and their 80's blowouts. Think back to the heady days of seeing family, hugging and kissing on greeting and not thinking about the contents of fellow person's nasal passage and GOING TO THE PUB OR A RESTAURANT! The good old days I think they're called.

I've noticed a tendency in lockdown week 9 to have a shorter patience span than normal. Small things become exceedingly irritating. I've come to the conclusion that it's not me but rather Corona is to blame. Things such as a bit of misaligned FRAGILE tape (cut off at say G) on a box that's arrived containing something irrelevant I've bought from eBay (essential vases and crockery obvs) induce a sort of inner rage. Or perhaps an uncharacteristic butt of heads with teammates as you argue over whether a quiz picture is a boob or a butt. And so queue a 'toys being launched out of the pram' episode. But then it dawns on me that this enforced shrinking of each of our world's mean that the big stuff has gone away for a while - we can't travel, we can't escape, we can't make big life plans without remembering the 'thing.' So perspective is massively distorted and so if it makes you feel fleetingly better and you want to rage at whatever takes your fancy (misshapen meatballs, warm wine, too cold ice etc), then go ahead and do sweat the small stuff. Let's face it this entire debacle is based on microscopic balls with suckers getting into our minuscule cells, so if you want to sweat small stuff, sweat it. COVID-19 is making us do all of it!

Emotions are under microscopic scrutiny in lockdown

Questions I'm asking myself this week

1) Why am I trying to social distance when I'm in my car? It's like all of a sudden we've become so conditioned to avoid strangers and see them at a distance it's filtering into places where it need not be observed.

2) What is a traffic jam? And are they happening anywhere now?

3) Is Skype the new blackberry handheld device dying on its arse? Why before now was everything about skyping when you needed a video call but now you don't even hear that word and there's a new kid in town - it's all ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM and possibly House Party. Who knew?

No, I don't have the answer.....

4) Why am I doing weekly quizzes? I absolutely hate quizzes and yet every Friday night kicks off with a family and friend gathering on ZOOM for a quiz. Thank God for google which provides the questions at the last second and then I have to remind myself to also write the answers down also as not in a million years would I know the answers without googling them.

5) How on actual earth would you sew a hoover filter into a face mask?

6) If I had to choose 10 family members to be in the 'safe COVID-19 fold,' who would they be given we are a family of 20?

Keep safe and well all of you X